A Saint of Darkness

[Woodmonkey]

What many don't realize is that there is a long tradition of people, even saints, questioning their faith (the angst). After all, how can one truly believe what one has never examined or questioned?


A Saint of Darkness

To the extent people ever tried to project themselves into the mind of Mother Teresa, they might have pictured a Gothic vault washed in dazzling beams of saintly conviction. How startling to discover that it was a dark and dispirited place, littered with doubts.

A new book of her letters, “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light,” published by Doubleday, show her struggling for decades against disbelief. “If I ever become a saint,” she wrote in one letter, “I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ ” And in another: “If there be no God — there can be no soul. If there is no soul then Jesus — You also are not true. Heaven, what emptiness.”

That may rattle some believers, but it is a welcome reminder that saints, too, are only human, and that stories of dauntless piety tend to be false. The letters — which Mother Teresa wanted destroyed — may help chip away at the lacquer of myth that has been adhering to her since well before her death in 1997.

They reveal, too, a cannily willful nun, who tested the limits of her vow of strict obedience in her campaign to win permission to leave her order, the Loreto Sisters, to found the Missionaries of Charity, with the radical goal of going outside convent walls to live among the poor of Calcutta’s slums. “Please let me go,” she wrote in one of many insistent letters to her archbishop. “If the work be all human, it will die with me, if it be all His it will live for ages to come. Souls are being lost in the meantime.”

When the archbishop relented, the rest became history, until the revelation of the pain that haunted her down the decades.

“I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe,” wrote Flannery O’Connor, the Roman Catholic author whose stories traverse the landscape of 20th-century unbelief. “What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.”

O’Connor suffered from isolation and debilitating illness, Mother Teresa from decades of spiritual emptiness. But — and here is the exemplary part, inspiring even by the standards of a secular age — they both shut up about it and got on with their work. Mother Teresa, sick with longing for a sense of the divine, kept faith with the sick of Calcutta. And now, dead for 10 years, she is poised to reach those who can at last recognize, in her, something of their own doubting, conflicted selves.

The Source